Anyone who was anticipating an ‘election audit’ from the Brazilian Ministry of Defense (DOD) report issued immediately, as non-public teams have been doing not too long ago (right here and right here and right here), was sorely disillusioned.
Contrary to what has been described and believed, the aim of this 60+ pages DOD technical report of the evaluation, performed from Aug. 2 to Aug. 19, 2022.
Nothing extra, nothing much less.
Whether there was electoral fraud, as feared by hundreds of thousands of protesting Brazilians, stays at the hours of darkness.
The report doesn’t embody a post-election poll field analysis, a poll audit, or a radical election audit.
But it states that the poll field may be tampered with as a result of it isn’t exempt from malicious code to current safety issues.
It additionally evidenced that entry to the supply code and a number of other different requests had been denied.
The Brazilian DOD describes the target of the report as follows:
It isn’t the aim of this doc to evaluate the extent of safety of the FSPA. Therefore, the only objective of describing the findings that resulted from the inspection course of is to supply the election court docket with solutions for doable enhancements from an inspection company’s perspective independently and impartially.
And even this evaluation must be taken with a grain for the reason that Superior Electoral Court TSE had outlined limits on system entry and supply code evaluation, as listed beneath:
- Only static evaluation was allowed, i.e., it was not possible to execute the supply codes, which resulted in not understanding the execution order of the person elements of the system and the operation of the system as a complete.
- Each unit had a duplicate of the supply code. The code was accessed by the computer systems of the TSE. The TSE allowed technicians to enter the inspection room with solely paper and pencil.
- No entry was granted to the TSE’s model management system, so it was not doable to check the compiled model with the model being inspected, nor was it doable to confirm that the supply codes matched.
- This means there is no such thing as a assurance that the code within the poll containers is similar as that which was verified.
- Access was not granted to software program libraries developed by third events and referenced within the supply code, limiting the understanding of the audited system; and
- The limitations of testing within the evaluation setting made it tough to check a fancy system with greater than 17 million strains of supply code.
In mild of the above, “it was impossible to certify that the system was functioning properly”, concluded the Defense Ministry, leaving the nation stranded in no man’s land.